Sigmund Freud

Childhood and Schooling: 1856–1873

The University Years: 1873–1881, page 2

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In 1873, Sigmund Freud graduated from the Sperl Gymnasium
and was faced with the question of what to study at the University
of Vienna. There was never a question about whether or not he would go
to the university; he had long been on a path toward a professional
life in academics, medicine or law. It was now simply a matter
of deciding which path to take. Despite initially leaning toward
law, partly on the basis of a friend's recommendation, Freud eventually
decided on medicine. It was not that he was eager to be a physician:
in fact, although he eventually took great satisfaction in his therapeutic
work, Freud never felt at home in the medical profession. Freud's
true passion was science.

Freud started medical school at seventeen, an unusually
early age. It took him an unusually long time to finish medical
school. Not until 1881 did he finally received his medical degree.
Reports from friends who knew him during that time, as well as
information from Freud's own letters, suggest that Freud was less
diligent about his medical studies than he might have been. He
focused instead on scientific research. He started by studying
the sexual organs of eels–an odd and amusing foreshadowing of the
psychoanalytic theories that would follow more than twenty years
later. According to all reports, Freud performed his assigned task
satisfactorily, but without brilliant results. In 1877, disappointed
at his results and perhaps less than thrilled at the prospect of
dissecting more eels, Freud moved to the laboratory of Ernst Brücke,
the man who was to become his first and most important role model
in science.

Brücke was a physiologist from the strictly physicalist
school that had first arisen with Freud's father's generation.
Brücke and others argued that special "vital" forces were not necessary
to explain life; rather, all biological phenomena could be explained
by reference to basic physical laws, even if–as was certainly the
case in Brücke's and Freud's time–the connection to those laws
was not apparent. As a physiologist, Brücke was concerned with
the function of particular cells and organs, not just with their
structure. Brücke's work thus focused on the attempt to discover
basic physical laws that governed the processes that took place
in living systems.

When Freud formulated his theories of psychoanalysis in
the 1890s, he abandoned the physicalism of Brücke's position, but retained
the search for universal laws and the emphasis on processes, or
dynamics. ("Psychodynamic psychology" is a modern term that refers
to Freud's theories of psychology and others like it that describe
the mind in terms of dynamic interactions between different mental
structures.) Freud's later focus on the sex drive can be seen,
in two ways, as a result of his study under Brücke. First, the focus
was a nod to physicalism–an attempt to link the vicissitudes of
the mind to changes in the body (i.e. sexual arousal). Second,
it was a strongly reductionistic approach–an attempt to boil down
the huge complexity of human motivation into one basic drive.

In Brücke's laboratory, Freud worked on brain anatomy
and histology. His most important project was determining whether
a certain kind of nerve cell in frogs was the same kind found in
humans, or whether there were essential differences between the
nerve cells of humans and "lower" animals. This project had relevance
to an ongoing debate that had been sparked by Charles Darwin's Origin of
the Species, published some twenty years earlier: is humanity
above the laws of nature, or subject to them like any other living organism?
Freud's work in Brücke's lab showed that the human and frog spinal
neurons cells were of the same type. In a small way, Freud thus
contributed to Darwin's quest to show that humans were genetically
and historically linked to all other animals on earth. Later, Freud
would claim that his own discovery– psychoanalysis–was the next
step after Darwin's in bringing humanity down from its pedestal.

Early in Freud's university career, in 1875, he took his
first trip to England. There, he visited his half-brother Emmanuel
and his family in Manchester. Freud adored the English language
and culture, and greatly enjoyed his first visit. He returned only
twice in his life, once in 1908 to visit his brother in Manchester
again, and again in 1938, sixty-three years after his first visit,
when the Nazi takeover of Austria finally forced him to flee Vienna.

...I think you might need to update your review of the research consensus! Although it has developed a lot from Freud's original ideas, psychoanalytic theory - and practice - are still in use, and proving useful. It's been a while since the ideas you're describing here (either about psychodynamic or cognitive therapy) were part of the common psychological discourse about treatment or research methodology...